Presto's Hard Drive Monitor is a gadget for the Windows Vista sidebar. It reports the free space on up to four local or network connected hard drives. Free space is displayed both in text and graphical form.

(Alternate version with enhancements from Hans-Peter Ksionski. This version makes it easier to select the drives to monitor and lets you change how often the gadget is updated.)

My motivation in writing this gadget came from three sources: Foremost was TinyResmeter, a very useful tool that I have been using for some time on Windows XP. When I installed Vista, I immediately checked the gadget library for a similar tool, and discovered HDD Meter. HDD Meter delivers the same approximate functionality, but only supports one drive and, in my humble opinion, is not very efficient with its use of screen real estate -- especially if you have four drives to monitor!

Thus, I decided to write my own, modeled after HDD Meter's code. I was heavily influenced by the user interface of Multi Meter, which has a nice theme of display a horizontal bar graph next to text information. I ended up rewriting most of the HDD Meter code in order to better meet my needs, and the end result is Presto's Hard Drive Monitor.

Please contact me if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for this gadget!

P.S. Special thanks to SFkilla for the original HDD Meter idea and for allowing the use of his style and graphics!

P.P.S. Many thanks to Jim for his debugging help in writing this, my first Vista gadget. Jim also created the hard drive icon shown in the gadget control panel.

Feature Suggestions

Hide drives on main display unless their threshold is reached

Display total space of all drives

Release History

1.53 (download) (2009-03-29) Right justify free space for cleaner look. User-changeable precision on free space display (and "auto" mode where gadget figures it out based on free space amount). Added auto-update notification. Added option for left or right alignment of numbers. Added Si units (1000 bytes instead of 1024 as base unit). (Thanks to Jon Bozward and Tony Tanzillo for some of the feature suggestions.)